VMWare — Rolling your own OEM branded image to include missing vibs

Problem: A fresh install of HPE branded ESXi 6.5 U1 cannot see the LUNs on the SAN during the installation. The server boots from SAN which means I need to be able to connect to the remote LUNs during installation. There is no local storage. Currently on 5.5u3, it is working fine. The HPE branded 6.5U1 installer does not see the LUNs presented by my SAN. A quick boot into the 5.5 installer confirms it can see the LUNS with no problems ruling out zoning issues, physical issues, etc.

The HPE ESXi 6.5 image seems to be lacking support for the Qlogic BR-815/Qlogic BR-825/Brocade-415/Brocade-825 FC cards which are all mostly the same card. After verifying compatibility of the server, and of the BR-815 FC cards, I determined that the driver simply is not included in the HPE image.

Here are the steps I took to roll my own installer using the HPE branded one as a base using the VMWare Image Builder toolset:

Identify where the VIB is available for the driver. In my case, the Brocade BR-815 driver was downloaded via the VMWare compatibility site: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=5346 — Note the VIB is actually inside a zip file inside the zip you download. It will be looking for a index.xml file in the root of the zip.

Use the esx-image-creator.ps1 to generate a new image with the newly included software: https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts/blob/master/Scripts/esxi-image-creator.ps1